License

Vi, the enforcer from League of Legends game.Made it as Birthday present.Done in about 7 hours in Photoshop.Character belongs to Riot Games.For large wallpaper version click here: [link]If you can think of something to be improved, please, leave comment down here.Hope you would like it!

I make it in photoshop CS6. It's not that hard. Find some smoke photos and remember how it tends to flow. Draw a lineart of a thing you want to stylize this way. Now you need to deform your smoke into shape you want so it can follow lineart. To make it easier you can use such tools as: warp(ctrl+t>right click>warp), liquify (filters>liquify) and the most interesting - puppet wrap (edit>puppet wrap). You can download some smoke brushes if drawing smoke is hard for you. Then add some colors via layer mask and thats it. It takes quite a lot of time but I think the result is worth it ^^

Roughly saying, yes. However head and fingers were drown only with round soft brush. And rendering is last and easiest thing to do - the main thing is to make the shape of smoke exactly as you want it to be via transformations and actually drawing lines.